Monday, March 31, 2014

Behind RIBA boycott stands Abe Hayeem

The latest move to stigmatise Israel's actions in the 'occupied territories' by calling for a boycott of Israeli architects would not normally be a focus of this blog - were it not for the major part played in the boycott campaign by Abe Hayeem, an architect of Baghdadi-Jewish origin.

"Britain’s leading architectural
association has called for its Israeli counterpart to be excluded from
the International Union of Architects in protest at Israel‘s occupation of Palestine, in a further indication of the growing momentum of the boycott movement.

"The Royal Institute of British
Architects (RIBA) has demanded the suspension of the Israeli Association
of United Architects (IAUA) from the international body, saying it
is complicit in the construction of illegal settlements in the West
Bank and East Jerusalem, and other violations of international law."

The motion for a boycott was passedby 23 votes to 16, with ten abstentions, after Hayeem gave a presentation to the RIBA Council.

The irony that Abe Hayeem comes from a family of Iraq Jews,
themselves 'ethnically cleansed' from their homeland, did not escape
commenters when Hayeem wrote a piece for the Guardian on the 'dark' colonial past of Tel Aviv :

Cynosarge:

Perhaps
next week you will write an article condemning the mistreatment and
expropriation of the Jews of Iran, Iraq, Syria, Egypt ....

And perhaps pigs might fly.

If
the Arab regimes had not driven out their Jewish populations, then
there might not have been the same need for Israel to house them all.

And Tom Wonacott commented:

Having
noted that you are a Jew from Iraq which numbered in 1948 about
120,000, would you care to discuss why the Arabs in Iraq (and everywhere
else in the Middle East) chose to persecute, harass and evict the Jews?
Today, fewer than 100 Jews remain in Iraq. What had the Jews in Iraq
done to deserve being run off from their homes, and their possessions
confiscated?

Regarding Iraqi Jews, my family loved living in Iraq and spoke fondly
of their Arab neighbours. Iraqi Jews always regretted leaving. It is
well known how Mossad agents stirred up trouble, to the extent of
bombing the Baghdad Synagogue, to frighten Iraqi Jews into leaving.Israel's
agenda was to create the flight of Arab Jews, to act as a quid pro quo
for ethnically cleansing the Palestinians. Many Arab countries like
Libya and Morocco tried to stop their Jews from leaving.

One can only hope that Abe Hayeem knows more about his chosen profession of architecture than he does about Jewish history and Middle East politics.

3 comments:

In that case build a tower in Jerusalem taller than al Aqsa and put a restaurant on top called "Gay Mohammed's - home of the world famous bacon Martini!" and dedicate it to RIBA and this moron in particular.

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Introduction

In just 50 years, almost a million Jews, whose communities stretch back up to 3,000 years, have been 'ethnically cleansed' from 10 Arab countries. These refugees outnumber the Palestinian refugees two to one, but their narrative has all but been ignored. Unlike Palestinian refugees, they fled not war, but systematic persecution. Seen in this light, Israel, where some 50 percent of the Jewish population descend from these refugees and are now full citizens, is the legitimate expression of the self-determination of an oppressed indigenous, Middle Eastern people.This website is dedicated to preserving the memory of the near-extinct Jewish communities, which can never return to what and where they once were - even if they wanted to. It will attempt to pass on the stories of the Jewish refugees and their current struggle for recognition and restitution. Awareness of the injustice done to these Jews can only advance the cause of peace and reconciliation.(Iran: once an ally of Israel, the Islamic Republic of Iran is now an implacable enemy and numbers of Iranian Jews have fallen drastically from 80,000 to 20,000 since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Their plight - and that of all other communities threatened by Islamism - does therefore fall within the scope of this blog.)